The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  In retrospect, Nina Alexandrovna could only wonder at young Marina’s perspicacity. You’d think she had nothing on her mind beyond Seryozha and her synopses. Yet, at the first historic tremor, she had divined in the decrepit general secretary’s replacement by a younger, more energetic one not a pledge of Soviet life’s continuity but the beginning of the end. She immediately began preserving the substance of the era for future use and purging it of any new admixtures, no matter how harmless they seemed at first. So it came to pass that their good old Horizon television—on which only impressionistic bursts of static were still in color—showed the farewell to that great figure of the modern day (the richly beflowered tomb, wreaths made to look like medals, the craned neck and half-face of a watchful man lined up to view the body)—and then went stone dead. Marina temporarily forbade anyone to buy another, but she did take out a subscription to Pravda. No one could say for certain whether Alexei Afanasievich could read now. He had always carefully worked his way through the newspapers, holding his place with a school ruler, as if measuring the quantity of information by the millimeter, but now he looked at the newspaper page that Nina Alexandrovna held at half-mast without moving his eyes at all. It might as well have been a bedsheet she’d picked up to mend. Nina Alexandrovna was charged with reading the paralyzed man specific articles, which Marina made fat deletions in and supplied with handwritten insertions. Nina Alexandrovna carried out these instructions, although she was embarrassed by both the articles and her own voice. She had to tilt the newspaper very slightly to find the end of Marina’s almost indecipherable sentence—and sensed vaguely that Alexei Afanasievich’s immured brain, with its dark bruise from the stroke, was sending her staticky, buzzing bleeps in reply. Every once in a while she imagined (she couldn’t bring herself to verify this) that if she just leaned closer to this desiccated head with the crookedly stretched mask where his face used to be she would be able to talk to Alexei Afanasievich without using any words at all.

  Very quickly, outside time became so altered that there wasn’t even anything in Pravda for Marina’s pen to rework. By the time they started knocking out windows in the stuffy Soviet rooms (overnight, the still relatively young and full-cheeked Apofeozov went from being first secretary of the Party district committee to being a democratic leader who had publicly torn up his Party card), inside time had come to a standstill, and this was the time maintained in Alexei Afanasievich’s room, which had a faint smell all its own that lacked an objective source, like the acrid trace of a burned match. Everything in the room manifested a tendency to stand still, to doze off in an uncomfortable position. Nina Alexandrovna would catch this special quality of autonomous time, at the boundary between wakefulness and sleep, when suddenly she merged with her surroundings and felt nothing but her own weight—which was bliss, but spoke to Nina Alexandrovna of her weariness even more than an attack of hypertension could. In the afternoons she noted how good it felt to hold the weight of most objects in the room.

  Something suggested to Nina Alexandrovna that this stopped time knew no essential difference between order and disorder. She couldn’t help but see that things in the room would accumulate and then shed their ordinary meaning. This loss of meaning was especially obvious while she was cleaning. Nina Alexandrovna battled resolutely against the thick and amazingly even dust that eagerly settled on a wet spot where tea had spilled, quickly becoming a fuzzy patch. She was endlessly wiping and feeling everything like a blind woman, whether she needed to or not. Privately, Evgenia Markovna, the doctor who came to check on the patient, must have wondered at the sterile chaos maintained around the sick man. The china figurines on the sideboard looked like products of Nina Alexandrovna’s housecleaning, shiny knickknacks sculpted by hand and rag. Here, too, were crowded empty prescription bottles that should have been tossed long ago, also freshly wiped and clear right down to the medicinal tear at the bottom. The glassed-over Brezhnev portrait, which the doctor never examined but always turned to look at as she left the room, also bore the rag’s traces: a violet rainbow from cheap window cleaner. Each time as she finished with the portrait, Nina Alexandrovna would cautiously lower her bared leg with the swollen tendons to the floor and climb down from the wobbly chair in two moves, and Alexei Afanasievich would shut his big right and small left eye in approval, as if he were seeing precisely what he thought he should see.

  Klimov the skeptic, who had opposed the entire scheme (at the time he hadn’t yet lost all his rights and had tearfully defended himself against his mother-in-law’s slightest digs), remarked more than once that if they wanted to retain the atmosphere of the seventies, then they should hang a portrait of Vysotsky, but Marina, guided by instinct, ignored her husband’s advice. There was something false, of course, alien, even, about this particular portrait of Brezhnev. As Seryozha, who was busy with his then wildly lucrative (despite the sewer smells) video store at the train station, said, “It’s a prop right out of a Hollywood movie about Soviet life.” Yet this encapsulated time, which had survived its own violent demise in this one individual room, obviously possessed properties no one had ever observed in its natural state.

  These properties had something to do with immortality. The general secretary’s rejuvenated photo—half documentary print and half retouched and clearly made during his lifetime—was striking for that very quasi-drawnness you see only in a dead person’s features. So precise was this impression that, when she realized exactly what the impotent fold of Brezhnev’s mouth and the sepulchral tidiness of the hatched-in hair reminded her of, Nina Alexandrovna began wiping the portrait with anxious deference and avoided turning it over and seeing the half-erased inventory number on the back. But what was amazing was this: the general secretary, whose death had here been reversed and whose longevity had become a natural feature that only kept increasing, had somehow borrowed an authenticity from Alexei Afanasievich that Brezhnev himself had never possessed. If Brezhnev had been a cardboard figure in whose name books were written and on whom mutually exclusive medals had been hung, like a game of tic-tac-toe, then now there was no reason to question his existence, if only because the general secretary could no longer die—even if he were to admit his desire to do so. Also a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, he was now, in outside time, not dead but missing in action. Having effectively distanced himself from those veterans with schoolboy faces ruined by drink who shuffled along behind their new Communist leaders and continued to live in the present day, he had attached himself and even begun to bear a certain iconic resemblance to Alexei Afanasievich, who had never belonged to the Party. Anyone entering the room (though in fact they let in almost no outsiders) could see the paralyzed man’s forehead, as worn as a coin, and the two needly, low-hanging eyebrows—and see the same thing on the cheap wallpaper covered with teacup flowers. Even Nina Alexandrovna somehow succumbed to the reassuring illusion that Brezhnev in his official portrait was not the former head of the Soviet state at all but simply a distant relative.

  Naturally, as the project’s author, Marina had to decide whether this spectral time had any need of events. She had outlawed the principal natural event (death), thus rendering any event related to it (illness, injury, leadership changes, and so forth) impossible—and any attempt to add to this list made even the decisive (she had decided so much!) Marina uneasy. One got the feeling that the list permeated life so deeply that it might eventually include anything, even something no one had ever connected with death—as if, at the slightest attempt to pull out the plant, the roots would suddenly pull hard sideways and down and lift a little, like a seine loaded with every kind of dirt that ever comes under men’s feet. One way or another, Marina prohibited anything that might arouse negative emotions (in this sense, her stagnation had achieved perfection). She cut short any attempts by Nina Alexandrovna to inform the patient of anything personal—about an apartment in the next entryway being robbed, for instance, or Alexei Afanasievich’s nephew poisoning himself with rotgut vodka. “Mama, the
money!” Marina would exclaim in an anguished voice, obviously referring to Alexei Afanasievich’s heart but at the same time clutching at her own, the plump heart beating in her chest. “Daughter, dear, does it hurt?” “Mama, leave me alone!” Upon receiving this familiar rebuff, Nina Alexandrovna felt on her left side, under her ribs, a subtle ache, which she experienced as a heaviness in her fingertips. Aware that, with the consolidation of inside time, any illness of hers had simply become impossible, though, she took all this back with her to the kitchen. She now pictured Alexei Afanasievich’s heart—which had to be safeguarded as the family’s principal treasure—as a large crimson tuber for which his paralyzed body had become something like a vegetable bed entwined with engorged blue roots.

  It was strange to think that that heart had ever loved her. Had it really? Nina Alexandrovna had been beautiful once. Hers was a regular, rather insipid beauty so devoid of any color that the eye had nothing to latch onto. Her oval face, constituted in the refined, old-fashioned manner of penmanship lessons, simply could not withstand that inner darkness where an ordinary person might store and reproduce visual images—and so was not preserved in the memory even of people who knew her quite well; you could feel no emotion for her in her absence. There was probably some secret connection here to her fear of simple physical darkness, a fear Nina Alexandrovna had never been able to overcome. As a result, no one had ever really seen her high, virtually satin-stitched eyebrows, or the sweet outline of her lips, which were always chapped, like slices of apple left out on a saucer—but Nina Alexandrovna’s figure was quite ordinary, and her appearance on the street demanded no effort of attention whatsoever from passersby. No one had ever once tried to meet her, or asked for her phone number, even when she had purposely taken evening strolls through the Park of Culture, where the benches overflowed like seats on public transportation and tiny lights ran conscientiously down the garlands decorating the central paths, like ants down their trails. She had lived, unremarked, with sickly little Marina, who had been stricken with every ailment known to man, in the workers dormitory where she, the accidental mother, was always being yelled at by the superintendent’s wife, Kaleria Pavlovna, a large woman with a tiny mouth. One soft winter’s night, Kolya Filimonov, her neighbor down the hall, threw himself out his window and lay swelling up from the snow for several hours, in the shadows, resembling nothing so much as a parachutist’s bulging cupola, now deflated. A marriage proposal from an elderly, childless widower, who immediately gave her a light beige blouse in crinkly flat Syrian packaging, was an absolute lifesaver for Nina Alexandrovna; on her wedding day, she and her things were thrown out of the dorm.

  So had that happened or not? Alexei Afanasievich had never permitted any romantic nonsense (which he called literature) between himself and his young wife. His rare kisses, mainly in public, on holidays, had been as dry as a toothbrush. Alexei Afanasievich had strict rules about not touching Nina Alexandrovna at all during the day, as she scurried about her household chores, as if touching her would implicate him in women’s work. If he did take her by the arm at an evening gathering at the institute, say, then he held his gabardine elbow out, thereby denoting and maintaining the distance between himself and his spouse, which left her to mince along, her stubby, polish-dotted fingers resting on his undemonstrative woolen sleeve. Even at night, looming over his wife at an angle, nearly crosswise, as if he were a plane dive-bombing someone fleeing a routed echelon, Alexei Afanasievich made no attempt to talk to her and would not let her make a sound. Nina Alexandrovna had only to moan ever so softly and he would immediately cover her mouth and half her face with his salty, leathery palm. Nina Alexandrovna’s swollen lips retained that salt long after, making all her food seem tasteless and insipid, as if she were eating something still alive.

  On the other hand, he never brawled and never drank, the way other veterans did whose memories of the war had become symbols. Unlike them, Alexei Afanasievich kept it all in his mind, fully preserved, link upon link (the inevitable elements of secrecy in reconnaissance work had probably given this chain its special strength). On Victory Day, the former scout tossed back a single shot poured to the brim—without spilling a drop—and took his family, all dressed up for the occasion, to enjoy the fireworks. Loudspeakers everywhere blared verses about the immortality of great deeds. Brass bands blew hot marching music that sent sparks flying. And little Marina, all excited, her summer sandals flapping, raced ahead and scrambled up everything in her path, including railings and lampposts, raising hot bumps on her silly furrowed brow. When at last the dull, friable salvo rang out and sparkling bouquets were set off above the oohing crowd, leaving a faint burning ember in the pale sky, a laughing Nina Alexandrovna knew moments of utter feminine happiness alongside her hero, who in honor of the holiday had his arm around her plump little shoulder. At those fireworks she felt happier than the real heroines of May 9th, the sprightly aunties with their white curls and gold teeth shuffling along to the jangle of medals and the yapping of squeeze-boxes held chest high. “They don’t make people like that anymore,” murmured Alexei Afanasievich, as he greeted yet another frontline woman, who planted a pursed carnation of red lipstick on his well-scraped cheeks. Nina Alexandrovna, standing modestly back, thought that someday she would prove to her husband her full value, her feminine selflessness, maybe even her valor—but now the years had flown by and he had had a stroke.

  The Kharitonovs never really got the hang of love. Now the traces of her former beauty had become more noticeable than the beauty itself had ever been; the years seemed to have applied a crude layer of stage makeup to Nina Alexandrovna’s face and neck. At times, Nina Alexandrovna thought that her paralyzed husband not only didn’t love her but simply didn’t realize that she was she. Maybe this was because Nina Alexandrovna was often embarrassed to talk to him; it felt like talking to herself or, even worse, a cat or a dog. Given the limitations imposed by her daughter, any sentence had to be fully composed in her mind before it could be spoken; sometimes Nina Alexandrovna would start out smartly and gaily, right at the door, but then she would forget a word, instantly forget everything else, blush, and get mixed up, exactly as if she’d been caught out in a lie—and as a result fewer and fewer words remained. Relief came only when she did something physical with the patient: fed him his cereal and strained soup, having wrapped an old sheet around him (on which half his dinner would be left in curdled patches), like at the barber’s; or scraped off his stubborn, salty, fish-scaly stubble (once she dreamed of Alexei Afanasievich in a salt-and-pepper beard that sucked up his eyes and cheeks, and she awoke in tears). The harder the job, the more natural it felt. If during these ablutions Alexei Afanasievich’s body, which had accumulated a shapeless layer of fat on its sides, was especially hard to turn over, Nina Alexandrovna would shout smartly at the sick man, as if she were a stranger—a nurse or an aide.

  Evidently, nothing from outside time could serve as an event for inside time anymore; communication between the two times had ceased. Inside had its own daily routine, which was defined by task: feeding and shaving him, plumping his pillow, slipping a bedpan under his bursts of defecation, wiping his body down with rubbing alcohol-soaked cotton balls that quickly hardened, covering him with a blanket for modesty’s sake. The fact that Alexei Afanasievich’s body was also laboring (when it swallowed, its throat expanded more powerfully than any athlete’s muscle) created the illusion of a shared life that even had a kind of temporal goal. These daily events weren’t enough, though. Inside time demanded a broader scope as well, and even Nina Alexandrovna sensed that every scene played out between her and the paralyzed body required context for plausibility.

  As a result, something arose that could be likened to the pseudo-metabolism in a feeding vampire’s organism. After she decided to invent pseudo-events (honorably shedding her own blood first), Marina one day announced—ostensibly to her mother, who was sitting near the sick man—that she was applying for membership in the Communist Party. Duri
ng this open-ended period of candidacy, Marina, who had learned a thing or two over the years, acquired a cheap Korean television (which within twenty-four hours was white with dust, as if it had been draped with a cloth) plus the most basic VCR, which they concealed from the paralyzed man under a stack of desiccated newspapers. At the TV station, making use of the archives and the not altogether selfless help of secret allies discontent with Kukharsky’s internal policies, Marina edited the “evening news” for the sick man. The monotonous pictures consisted of collective applause, the kind of long shots of state workers that smudge not only hands but faces, a row of tall, smoke-belching, grated-window factory workshops, and summit-meeting kisses where the general secretary’s profile subsumes his partner’s oncoming profile, the way a processing machine subsumes its material. Soon Marina had teamed up with computer whiz Kostik (who fell in love with Brezhnev and asserted that using a program he had found on the Internet and downloaded illegally he could factor the general secretary’s voice into its female and male components), and they got so good at it that they were able to create the Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-Ninth Congresses of the Soviet Communist Party for the paralyzed man. Serving as material, in part, were black-and-white Duma sessions, which they spliced in (there was something artificial about Chernomyrdin, who flashed across the screen a few times and bore a distant resemblance to Brezhnev), but the general secretary himself delivered a speech many hours long, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world, efficiently setting the text out in two stacks. Marina nearly believed she was actually hearing every word of the speech being delivered by the two-voice chorus. Meanwhile, the text suggested that there had been an increase in international tension, and the deputies in the audience listened meekly, like troops seated rather than standing in straight lines.